Thinkers50 RADAR

Email Address *

First Name *

Last Name *

Title *

Organization *

* indicates required

Finding New Growth

Rita Gunther McGrath, Mark Esposito

The new context, part 2. Where are your best market opportunities for growth? Blue oceans, adjacent markets, digital and physical, convergent and reframed, means that markets are in flux. Innovating your marketspace is as important as innovating your business. Or should come first. Time to think smarter about your choice of markets, focusing investment and innovation where the future returns will be greatest.

Professor Rita McGrath, the world’s leading growth expert, challenged us to rethink our business strategies in fast-changing markets:

We need strategy more than ever. Whilst speed and uncertainty make strategy harder, we have more infinite opportunities, requiring more strategic choices.

Companies spend too much time thinking about competitors. They should spend more time looking ahead, and seeing the challenge from beyond their own sectors.

The best opportunities for growth lie in resolving the inefficiencies of current market models, and moving from products and services to experiences.

Rita Gunther McGrath is an expert on strategic business growth in uncertain environments. She is strategy professor at Columbia Business School in New York, ranks at #9 on the Thinkers50 global list, and won the 2013 Thinkers50 Strategy Award. She is known for her work on strategy, innovation and entrepreneurship, including the development of discovery-based planning. Her most recent book, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business serves as a playbook for strategy, and shows how some of the world’s most successful companies use this method to compete and win today.

Harvard’s Canadian judo-playing professor from Grenoble, Mark Esposito, took us to a different place, the future:

Strategy starts by making sense of the future. Understanding the megatrends and how they will shape your markets, customers and business.

Mark Esposito is a Harvard professor specializing in strategy for business, government and society. He serves as Institutes Council Co-Leader for the Microeconomics of Competitiveness (MOC) program at Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, and is also a tenured professor at Grenoble School of Management in France. He advises the European Parliament on the EU systemic crisis, works with the World Economic Forum on innovation driven entrepreneurship and collaborative innovation, and has similar advisory roles in the Netherlands, Italy and India. He features on the Thinkers50 Radar.